Doug Vannoni’s Comments

I worked at a local NYC tv station & once we made the mistake of including NY Mets tickets in a contest. the Mets, the MLB & a gang of lawyers attacked claiming all the things that Eagles have claimed.

At the end of the day, it wasn't the legal pressure that got us to fold, it was the threat of limiting our access to the team. As a news station, that would have been death for our sports dept. In most cases when media entities run afoul of major league anything, it's access that the teams use as leverage before lawsuits.

So aside from a bunch of crappy oldies & pop stations on the Jersey shore, does the NFL have any access leverage with which to pressure Equity Communications, LP. Guess we'll find out.

Not sure where you live, @Misanthropist, but when I first got cable in 1979, all the broadcast stations had their commercials from day one. And while the cable stations "experimented" with adding commericials, the broadcast stations never seemed to "experiment" by taking their commercials off.

Thing is, we can all talk about lobbyists & coprporate $$$ ruinging our culture, and I totally agree on every front.

This one, though, I think is wayyyy more simple. No one gives back a revenue stream, not in 1880, not in 1950, not in 1990 and certainly not in 2009 - maybe once every million years it happens.

What we are is greedy and what we do is push things onto people, and when people don't make any noise, that's taken as acceptance & that's the end of the story.

I for one am going to try to make some noise because the web really needs to remain the bastion of free-ness that is has been, but as we all know the lobbyists & corporate $$ can buy noisemakers that turn my tirade into nothing more than a faint hum. So come one peeps, FIGHT THE POWER!